It might seem unusual to work a site around to read from the right to the left, but if you are considering to have your site in a world scale, you better know what kind of enviroment you will face. Culture knowledge, what to do , what not to and mostly usability where our challenges in the last 2 weeks.
I’m working with Goal.com and just this week we have released the Persian version of the site. Making the default site become a RTL version site, in a way that anyone that reads from the right to left could easily read and access, have become a major experience.
CSS changes, small functions adaptations, mirrored words and parenthesis, all of this made part on the changes that we made for that site. The site would look just like the current one, but inversed and all of that with the same usability that we already have for the site. It was a lot of work and lot of fun.
After the site was launched, we got feedback from all over the world thanking us for making that possible and now I do truly realize why it is so important to have correct usability on the site, reading format and culture on a site.
Different users, different rules, different scenario and tons of hard work. The best of all, on the end, you can truly see that it is all worth the time.
If you are wondering what you would be facing, on a CSS matter, for this kind of changes, take a look at the W3 Org Internationalization Article.
By the way, if you follow soccer (I’m a braziliam so…), check out the Goal.com site, is trully good and fan oriented.
Creating applications to be user friendly (and user proof) is an extreme work, but time from time you always get some great idea for improving any system usability.
I was doing my taxes with Turbo Tax and, after everything is done I got one email with a good concept. It holded the username, a blank space for the password, the security question and a space for the the answer for that. Just like the image bellow.
Off course that if you are a little too worried about internet security (just like me) you would never print this card and keep it anywhere, but, consider for somebody that have trouble keeping passwords I bet this would be extremly usefull.
Anyway, the point is that the way the email was construcuted made easy for the user to be confortable with their information to use the site.
No matter where you are registering you will find 2 distincts password handling systems:
Case sensitive password storage
Case insensitive password storage
If you work in a LAMP enviroment most likely you will use a case sensitive method, since that’s what you are used to (Linux is a case sensitive system) and most likely you have set on your brain that this is the only secure accepted scenario for password handling, but when you start looking for the user side, case sensitive password handlers became an issue.
Talking with some users (none computer savy) I found out that a password with upper case letters, lower case letters, special chars and numbers combination is a little too much to remember.
Considering this and my will of testing out the poll system from WordPress, I would like to you guys to help me out.
I’m pretty strict with security and I would not exchange security for usability in a password system, but I would like to know what you guys think, so…
I was reading a news article from WordPress about the usability test done with WordPress 2.5 and I was impressed with the detail of the report.
If you are, just like me, an applications developer, you will find this usefull even if the application in the report is not yours. You will see common usuability mistakes and most important the point of view of the users.
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